7 ways to get the best Social Media Analysis

“Keep your friends close and enemies closer”. This old saying fits in every era. Nowadays, social media is our modernized battlefield. And social media competitive analysis is one such situation where this vintage suggestion works pretty well.

A need of performing the social media competitive analysis

Monitoring your competitor’s presence on social media not only helps you to keep a check on them by understanding their actions and social media competitive analysis strategy but also helps you to figure out your place in the market. Social media competitive analysis keeps you updated with your industry trends. It lets you know what people think of your competitors. You can figure out what is the most talked about brand in your industry and what the influencers talk about them. Knowing what your competitors are up to can provide great insights into the social media competitive analysis. For example, if your competitor adds a new feature and gets average reviews, you can work on it and offer something better. This certainly qualifies for the ground rule of social media competitive analysis.

How to conduct social media competitive analysis

A big portion of a competitor’s marketing campaigns can be found online. By overcoming the challenge of processing a large amount of unstructured customer review data, you’ll be able to see both the social media competitive analysis strategy behind it and the impact it created on your competitor.
Social media competitive analysis can help in the following ways to stay on the top of your industry:

1. Sentiment analysis for social media competitive analysis

Sentiment analysis gives you an overview of the wider public opinion behind certain topics. The applications of sentiment analysis are broad and powerful. On social media, the sentiment of a post can be seen in the tone or emotion conveyed in a brand mention. You can also use sentiment analysis to monitor the reviews of your competitor. However, to get the correct view, you would need a very powerful sentiment analysis engine. For example, our analysis of Google’s recent launch of its new phone “Pixel” using ParallelDots’ AI-based sentiment analysis technology brought forward following insights:

The following bar graph illustrates the most liked aspects of the phone, which certainly provide improvement/strategic goals for the social media competitive analysis.

Comparing the sentiment behind your brand management exercises with that of a competitor gives you an idea of how the undercurrents of brand perception in the market are changing. For example, ParallelDots’ AI-based sentiment analysis algorithms reveal that people were generally excited about Google’s launch of its new phone — “Pixel”. Now, this is an insight that adds a lot of value to the strategy of a competitor like Apple.

2. Lead generation

Selling to a competitor’s customer is easy and successful, as they are already in the later stages of a buyer’s journey. But you never want to just put yourselves out there. You have to wait for the right opportunity i.e. when they’re unhappy with your competitor. With media monitoring tool you can keep a track of the people who are talking about a weakness that might be one of your company’s strengths and get other relevant details related to the social media competitive analysis.

Key Tip: Instead of going in for the hard selling right away, take your time to build some rapport. Offer empathy and go in with the intention of helping, not selling. Social media competitive analysis should remain modest.

3. Find out where you stand by social media competitive analysis

Any insight that you derive from social listening become way more useful when you benchmark it with competitors. For example, ParallelDots’ intent classifier technology can give you insight that 20% of the mentions you get on social media are related to”complaints”. However, if you also get to know that the same metric for your competitor stands at 10%, then this becomes an actionable insight as for the social media competitive analysis.

4. Identify the Advocates and Influencers

Are your competitors including celebrities or public figures in their social media posts, or otherwise trying to get an influencer’s attention? Or your Industry’s most important people sharing their content?

If yes, you have your own influencer outreach list right there. If your competitors are successfully working with influencers, then the people they’re working with will probably be relevant to your audience too. Finding and reaching them out successfully can be a big boost to your brand’s online presence.

5. Get to know their content strategy through social media competitive analysis

Look at what your competitors are actually talking about on social media. Are they sharing company news? Promoting products and services? Asking questions to start conversations? Distributing marketing and PR campaign content?
Knowing what they choose to show to their audience says a lot about their goals for social media competitive analysis. And if you can see that they’re looking to drive engagement, you know what kind of content their audience likes and what type of content keeps them engaged. This approach is really helpful when you need to engage your own while smartly deriving the metrics from the social media competitive analysis.

6. Get Feedback on Products

Analyzing the feedback that you receive about your and competitors’ products on social media can sometimes unveil incredibly valuable insights. Sometimes a company can learn about new faults in their products and take corrective actions before it starts hurting the brand reputation through a smartly planned social media competitive analysis. Knowing the emerging chinks in the armour of your competitor’s products can be an important part of your social media competitive analysis strategy to gain market share.

7. Keep Innovating

Understanding what customers want is not as easy as it sounds. Traditional business wisdom suggests executives and manager can’t understand what their customers value unless they go out in the market and listen to their reviews. By listening to what customers are saying about your and competitors’ products on social media, business and product development teams can get crucial insights into what aspects of the products are highly valued and deserve greater attention. This innovation gets dynamic if you are a social media competitive analysis pro.

At Karna-AI, a ParallelDots product, we deploy a range of cutting-edge AI techniques to derive meaningful insights from large chunks of unstructured text. This can be of great use to brands, market research companies and consulting agencies of all kinds. If you have any questions or suggestions, we would love to hear from you. our social media handles Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Medium.

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